In this activity students will learn about the spatial variability of drought in the United States.

This article discusses the interaction of El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). Each cycle creates specific patterns of warm and cool water in the Pacific and cause changes in the trade winds, which affect sea levels.

Students explore 150+ years of scientific work, an interdisciplinary body of knowledge that contributed to the discovery of global warming. Students will develop a qualitative and quantitative sense about how Earth"™s global mean temperature has changed over the Industrial Era and its relationship global carbon dioxide levels.

Students learn that atmospheric composition is one of the major factors in the long-term control of Earth's climate. They then build a model of how carbon cycles through the Earth system.

In this activity, students participate in a class discussion of the carbon cycle and how increases in carbon may impact global climate patterns. This activity is complementary to the video "The Ecology of Climate Change."

This tutorial provides information about El Nino - its early warning signs, its ancient past, its global connections, and its impacts on the globe.

This guide was developed to support teachers in teaching topics with real-world context, and provide them with the background to feel competent and comfortable when teaching about the climate change. The guide includes numerous education features, such as teaching tips and student thinking, that help to connect the content to classroom practice.

In this unit, students will develop an understanding of climate change and how it is different from climate variability. Students will read articles and access data, maps, and graphs of trends. They will also view several short video clips and learn about and compare climate models. Students will see how climate impacts life and life impacts climate in both short and long timescales.

In this lab, students will get a better sense of how rapidly the most recent—century-scale—changes in global temperature are taking place as compared to past—millennial-scale—changes. They will gain a better understanding of the interrelationship between global temperatures and atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Students will also view satellite maps showing the spatial patterns of global warming over the past 150 years.

This set of graphs from the Web site for the NOVA/FRONTLINE Special Report: "What's Up with the Weather?" reveals how atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxides from the burning of fossil fuels have climbed over time. The graphs show data collected during the study of ice core samples and are featured in the article "Stories in the Ice." Supplemental resources, including a background essay and discussion questions, are also provided.

This video graphic shows the change in global warming for the past century.

In this lesson, students observe demonstrations, and build and evaluate simple models to understand the greenhouse effect and the role of increased greenhouse gas concentration in global warming.

In this lesson, students will practice distinguishing between correlation and causation within the context of global climate change. Students will think critically and analyze different claims and datasets related to what might be causing increasing temperatures in a fictitious town called Solutionville, as well as around the globe. Although students will be working within the context of a fictitious town, the temperature and carbon dioxide data they will be analyzing are real and will enable them to see relationships between global temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Finally, students will watch a video in which they will be learn that the burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and they will begin to explore the connections between human activities and global climate change.

This science update discusses the increase in hurricane activity in the mid 1990s and the proposed reasons for the increase.

Students use computational models to explore how Earth's surface and greenhouse gases interact with radiation. Then they interpret real-world changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide over short and long time frames.

In this lesson, students investigate basic principles that relate to thermohaline circulation. Then they view a short video that connects these concepts to oceanic circulation and the potential for climate change.

In this lesson, students investigate weather patterns and climate and how they are changing. Students conduct research about an assigned weather topic and create an interactive project/presentation that can be used to teach classmates about a weather topic.